Backing up a backup?

Does anyone know of a solution or workflow of backing up the backup (file archive drives)? My company is looking to keep an additional copy of all our archive drives (there are quite a few of them) offsite, so God forbid if the place burned to the ground, we would still have all of our projects somewhere safe. Or the more likely scenario of plugging in a drive to restore from and finding out it won't turn on. Hard drives only last for so long (not as long as a tape could last) but with more and more projects having mixed media, a file archive is a necessity.

Rather than opening up a previous archive, restoring it to the computer, and archiving it again to another drive, does anyone know of a faster/more efficient way of making an additional backup? Or maybe even being able to backup to 2 drives at the same time? We have a cache system with LTO tapes set up for mac based projects, but I'm not sure if its possible to backup the Linux archive to it (and be able to restore back into Smoke when needed).

Our Flame is connected to our XSAN, so I am able to archive directly to our network. My archives live there for about a year, or until we are sure we dont need it to access it. We also do regular LTO backups of Flame archives, and other important data.

Is your Flame connected to a network at all? If not, you might want to look into getting it connected.

Yes I do believe our machine is connected to the network (we actually have a Flame and a Smoke) and we use Wiretap and Fetch to access the machines a lot. We don't have an XSAN though. I've been searching through the inter-webs trying to find a workflow or something that gives a breakdown of the process of backing up a Linux formatted drive to the Cache-A LTO tapes (and then restoring back to a Linux formatted drive to restore in Flame/Smoke). Any insight with that?

So, if you are using wiretap, then the Flame and a Mac are on the same network. You might want to have your IT guy take a look at creating a mount point on the flame, so that the Flame can directly access a Mac volume. (thats what we do)

Personally, I dont trust external drives for archiving. Hard drive fail too often for them to be a reliable form of archiving, but maybe Im just paranoid. We have about 20 external drives that we use for transporting files, and they just dont last, especially if they get moved around alot.

Oh rock on, thanks! Yeah currently we are only archiving file archives to external drives. Your fears are shared, we need an alternative solution. I'm sure one day in the near future all of these archives will fail to load.

This link looks very helpful, hopefully we can have our assistants start to mount and cache-A all of our current backups. Thanks again!